The Almanac of the Dead: A Novel (45 page)

Old Yoeme had paused and looked them both in the eye before she had continued. “You see, it had been the almanac that had saved them.
The first night, if the eldest had not sacrificed a page from the book, that crippled woman would have murdered them all right then, while the children were weak from hunger and the longer journey.

“As long as all our days belong to Death-Eye Dog, we will continue to see such things. That woman had been left behind by the others. The reign of Death-Eye Dog is marked by people like her. She did not start out that way. In the days that belong to Death-Eye Dog, the possibility of becoming like her trails each one of us.”

THE OLD MAN was that way. You could play him cards or dice, and if you beat him, he would just laugh and say you were too young to have such a bad memory. He’d claim he had won with three kings or with five threes on the dice. He would pour you more of the rotten-smelling beer he brewed out of any kind of weed or plant or cactus he could find. The old man was slow, lazy, and dangerous. He would get enough of his smelly home brew in him and then he would start bragging about his ancestors and how they had been the most illustrious and powerful. Full of beer he used to get very serious, and when I was a young child, I felt frightened. It was then he bragged the ancestors had seen “it” all coming, and one time I interrupted to ask what “it” was, and he waved his hands all around the shady spot where we were sitting and he said, “The time called Death-Eye Dog.” There was no one in the area who could talk the way the old man did.

Once the old man got rolling he would talk as if others were present and they were arguing with him, debating some point or another. So whenever he addressed the present time we live in as “Death-Eye Dog,” it seemed those invisible ones knew the time by other names, and the old man would quickly correct himself. Some knew it as “The Reign of Fire-Eye Macaw,” which was the same as saying “Death-Eye Dog” because the sun had begun to burn with a deadly light, and the heat of this burning eye looking down on all the wretched humans and plants and animals had caused the earth to speed up too—the way the heat makes turtles shiver in a last frenzy of futile effort to reach shade. The only true gods were all the days in the Long Count, and no
single epoch or time of a world was vast enough or deep enough to call itself God alone. All the ancestors had understood nothing stayed fixed in the universe. Originally the sun and the stars had come from a deep blue darkness, spinning and whirling and scattering themselves in arcs above us, called the Big River or the Milky Way.

That old man had been interested in what the Europeans thought and the names they had for the planets and stars. He thought their stories accounting for the sun and the planets were interesting only because their stories of explosions and flying fragments were consistent with everything else he had seen: from their flimsy attachments to one another and their children to their abandonment of the land where they had been born. He thought about what the ancestors had called Europeans: their God had created them but soon was furious with them, throwing them out of their birthplace, driving them away. The ancestors had called Europeans “the orphan people” and had noted that as with orphans taken in by selfish or coldhearted clanspeople, few Europeans had remained whole. They failed to recognize the earth was their mother. Europeans were like their first parents, Adam and Eve, wandering aimlessly because the insane God who had sired them had abandoned them.

Menardo had loved the stories his grandfather told him about the old man who drank stinking beer and talked about and sometimes talked
with
the ancestors. Menardo had loved the stories right up until the sixth grade when one of the teaching Brothers had given them a long lecture about pagan people and pagan stories. At that time the boys had started looking at the girls who did not go to school, but who were required to spend mornings working around the church, either in the kitchen or in the convent area where they washed and cleaned or in season put up the fruit and vegetables. The girls with quick hands learned sewing and embroidered heavy satin vestments for the monsignors and the bishop.

Menardo had been fat all his life. But in those days the others had picked on him and made fun of him. Pansón was the name they called him, and he did not mind it because one of the older boys had found a far worse name. For the rest of his life Menardo could hardly think of it, let alone whisper it. When he looked in the mirror to shave, it always came back to him. Flat Nose. A slang name the Indians were called. “Flat noses that dogs don’t even have.” The boy who made up the name was dark skinned himself, but he was also tall and had legs and arms of a man. When he beat up the younger boys, he always picked them
up and threw them up in the air, so they were injured in the fall and not by blows from the fists or feet.

Around the time the others had called him Flat Nose and Big Belly, Menardo had made a horrible discovery. His grandfather’s nose had been much shorter and wider than his was; the people the old man called “our ancestors,” “our family,” were in fact Indians. All along Menardo had been listening to the one who was responsible for the taunts of the others. Without the family nose, Menardo might have passed for one of
sangre limpia.
Immediately Menardo found excuses for not going down the street where the old man lived in a small
ramada
in a garden. Menardo was afraid the other boys might come by and hoist themselves up on the back wall of the garden and see Menardo sitting with the old man.

Menardo’s cousin had finally come to the house one evening to tell them the old man was begging to have Menardo visit him as before. Menardo had rehearsed his lies for his mother and was able to repeat them to his cousin in flawless form: he was studying now to become an altar boy and had to spend all his free time at the rectory. Menardo almost felt sorry because the old man was the only one of all the adults who did not require anything in return, except that Menardo listen. The old man talked about other times and other worlds that existed before this present one. The old man recognized evil, whatever name you called it.

Not long after his cousin had come asking why Menardo did not visit grandpa, the old man had died in his sleep. Menardo had been relieved once they got him buried because he had studied the shapes and sizes of the noses of all his uncles and aunts and cousins; the only one with a suspicious nose was Menardo, and once the evidence the flat nose was inherited had been buried, Menardo knew exactly what to do.

He had gotten the idea out of a magazine that one of the older boys had smuggled into chapel. They had wanted the magazine because it had ads in it for women’s lipstick and perfume, and one of the ads showed a woman whirling around in a dress that showed the tops of her thighs. It was an exciting picture and the boys had nearly ruined it with their sweaty hands, smudging all the black ink on the page. But later on, when the picture was ruined and the magazine was stuffed behind the cupboard of the priest’s kitchen, Menardo had taken the magazine to the outhouse, in case he might still be able to make out the image of the woman whirling in her short dress. But the wonderful page
had been torn out. What he found was a picture article on boxing and the new flyweight champion of Chiapas. The new champion was talking about his success and his hopes of meeting the flyweight champion of all Mexico, who was second in the world only to the Filipino champion. The champion had hazel eyes, just like Menardo, and his hair was light brown. But more important, his nose had a wide, flat look that the champion called his only regret. “An older, heavier opponent smashed my nose into my face,” the champion said. “But the women still like me, don’t they, Evita?” the champion said to the gorgeous, shapely blonde at his side during the interview.

THE BOXING ARTICLE had given Menardo the answer he needed. He would bring it up casually. As he had later when he was courting Iliana. Menardo imagined her father was staring at his nose. Menardo had to swallow hard to keep from blurting it right out like a maniac: “It got broken in a boxing match!” Such an outburst would have finished the whole courtship right there. Iliana’s family was among the oldest in Tuxtla Gutiérrez—her great-grandfather on her mother’s side had in fact been part of the original Gutiérrez family that had settled the area. Menardo had risen quickly in the insurance business because he knew exactly what people wanted to hear.